What product should I purchase: Add-in Express for Office and .NET or Office and VSTO?

What product should I purchase: Add-in Express for Office and .NET or Office and VSTO?

Jakov Perica

Posts: 15Joined: 2014-12-06

I've been reading around and am still uncertain which product I should purchase, Add-in Express for Office and .NET or Office and VSTO?

I help other companies with Excel. I develop templates and macros and all sorts of solutions. I also want to develop, publish and sell some more general purpose Excel based applications. So far I have written all macros in VBA, but now I also want to start writing macros in C#.

EDIT: Most of the solutions I create in Excel are not pure add-ins but rather a combination of a workbook with functions and formatting + code that automates some actions.

We don't sell Add-in Express for Office and VSTO any longer. As to Add-in Express for Office and .NET, it allows creating COM add-ins (Ribbons, panes, event handling, workbook modifications), XLL add-ins and Excel Automation add-ins (custom functions to be used in formulas), Real-Time Data servers (provide real-time data to be used in formulas) and also combinations of the above. Add-in Express allows developing application-level solutions. You can make an application-level add-in to work on the workbook-level if you add some code in order to identify "your" workbooks. For instance "your" workbooks may have something on their properties that your add-in can check.

This technology is now available for our custom development services only. Based on the Add-in Express for Office core, it is designed for building custom-tailored Office add-ins with far less coding than you usually have to do. Plus, it includes all Add-in Express features such as True RAD, visual designers, Outlook view and form regions, etc.

Get the best platform for building version-neutral, fast and easy deployable plug-ins by using Add-in Express projects templates, visual designers, components and wizards in combination with a perfect Delphi compiler.

This is an extension for Visual Studio that allows developers to quickly create WiX-based setup projects in a familiar Visual Studio way.

The Designer for WiX Toolset lets you forget the plain Windows Installer XML and concentrate on your deployment logic. It integrates several editors with the Visual Studio IDE and provides a set of vdproj designers to configure the file system, registry, user interface, custom actions, launch conditions and more for your setup projects.

The innovative technology for customizing Outlook views and forms. It is included in all Add-in Express for Office products and can be used to extend Outlook views, e-mail, task and appointment windows, To-Do bar, Reading and Navigation panes with your own custom sub-panes.

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